Inspired by DSK’s posting of his wife’s snapshots, I present: the most ironic picture of IceStorm 2007. Click for bigger.
Yes, them icicles was over a foot long. And yes, they formed on my icicle lights.

Contrary to what Sal Costello’s band of merry anti-tollers alleges, SH45 and SH130, as tollways, were always supposed to get money from the 2000-2001 city and county bond packages. I remember; I was arguing against it at the time (not on this crackplog; it didn’t exist yet; but still).Shame on KXAN for just reporting this as fact. Mayor Watson didn’t “re-allocate” any money towards these toll roads; before the election, the city was advertising that these two tollways (and a third, Loop 1 North) were in fact the primary expected recipients of the right-of-way purchase money. While Austin didn’t promise exactly which road projects would receive funding, it was crystal clear at the time that a good chunk of right-of-way purchases were going to go to these tollways.
Costello appears to be hanging his hat on the weak argument that the city bond language didn’t SPECIFICALLY say that any money would go to “tollways” or “toll roads”. But neither did the city bond language say “freeways” or “free roads”; it said that a large chunk of the transportation bond would go to right-of-way contibutions for state highways, which it did. And the city didn’t mislead anybody into thinking these would be for non-toll-roads; again, backup materials before the election clearly indicated that they intended to spend these funds on SH130, etc.
The city, unlike the county, chose to group all transportation bonds together as a tactical move to try to get them passed, rather than risk environmentalists voting against the highways chunk and motorists voting against the bikeways/pedestrian chunk. That’s the only reason they didn’t have separate SH45 and SH130 items.

An argument I’ve made poorly in comments at some of the economics blogs I read has finally been backed up, at least anectdotally by a story linked to by Mark Thoma out of Washington State.
Briefly, if a higher minimum wage leads to higher-quality workers (whether previously uninterested adults or just better teenagers), the predicted negative effects on employment and business may actually not materialize. This is important because despite what the more ideologue economists will tell you (based on theory), there’s actually little real-world evidence that increases in the minimum wage actually increase unemployment.
Just a quick hit for the people getting tired of All Wal-Mart, All The Time.

The metric to help people cut through the plug-in hybrid fog is this:
Toyota had to figure out this “keep the charge on the battery between 30 and 70%” strategy to make the thing last longer than the “few years” the anti-hybrid FUDders like to claim it will.
So figure out how much more battery you’re going to need to drive on all electric for a lot longer than the Prius (several times larger than existing Prius battery). Then double it, so you can keep the charge in that band. Then figure out how much that weighs and costs.
Or, wait for a magic new battery which can fully deplete and fully charge while still lasting 15 years.
Either way, it ain’t happening soon.

Nobody ever raises this “charge band” issue specifically when talking about plug-ins, but it’s clearly the biggest obstacle to surmount. Either you need to haul around batteries ten or twenty times the size and weight of the already big Prius battery, or you’re going to be stuck in cell-phone hell where, like the incorrect FUD spewed about the Prius by hybrid haters, the battery really WILL die after just a few years or a few tens of thousands of miles.
The summary is this: without a radical, not merely evolutionary, improvement in battery technology, the plug-in hybrid is a non-starter. Period.
Keep in mind, while digesting these arguments, that the electric utility has a demonstrable incentive to push plug-in cars even when the technology isn’t really ready – the intention is that people will charge these vehicles mainly overnight, when the utility is literally swimming in energy it can’t really sell. It’s a boon to the utility to be able to get any money for that night-time electricity; otherwise they need to run some of their plants in less efficient modes (raising overall costs) or resort to costly energy storage schemes. They’re not idealistic crusaders here; they stand to seriously improve their finances.
References:

Austin Contrarian makes a good point about student rentals which further supports the contention that it’s better for surrounding neighbors if students rent individually rather than sharing a big house. My argument (re-expressed through comment to his post) was based on landlord’s disincentive to penalize tenants in a big house versus in a fourplex or apartment/condo building; his adds a point I’ve not discussed before – the “party house” factor.

Yes, all college towns have students sharing houses, but we’ve got a lot more than you would expect, given the size of our city, health of our central-city residential economy, etc. We have so many (disproportionate for a ‘college in healthy big city’) bad student rental houses because people like my neighborhood association fought true multi-family development even on Guadalupe for decades – meaning that students who want to live near campus get artificially incented to live together in houses. Many of the students sharing these houses, in other words, would have been just as happy (or more so) in an apartment – where you can count on more amenities and less hassle – but have been forced to choose between jamming into a house or moving to Far West or Riverside.

The McMansion ordinance further exacerbates the problem. The “highest use” for small single-family houses in my area particularly has now shifted much farther towards student rental and much farther away from “sell to a family that wants to live central” since the expandability of these properties has taken a drastic hit. The too-little too-late West Campus upzoning isn’t going to help now that we’ve thrown another obstacle in the way of families wealthy enough to buy entry on a small lot property but not wealthy enough to live on the bigger lots that the Karen McGraws and Mary Gay Maxwells can afford (or were able to buy back when they were merely expensive, not astronomical). In other words, despite what you heard about the ordinance protecting families, actual central Austin owner-occupant families like me and my neighbor are just getting screwing out of a future in Central Austin – when my neighbor goes, and he’s currently looking, he’ll be renting to students).